Stories

Blue Box Group is a premier managed Rails hosting provider with flexible cloud, dedicated, and hybrid solutions. Their experts bring top-tier operations and configuration support during deploys, migrations, and maintenance, allowing you to focus on writing great code. They're committed to providing the best possible infrastructure for your application, period.

Late last week, 37signals released Pow, a zero-configuration Rack server for Mac OS X. With it, you no longer need to start/stop your local application servers and instead, just point your browser to a special ".dev" domain to access your applications.

Scott Windsor wrote in to let us know about his "[h]ow I learned to stop worrying and love the Unicorn," article. In it, he covers some of the disadvantages of other solutions and highlights some of the incredible features of using Unicorn in your production environment.

Sebastian Hermida of Happy Prog recently released TDGotchi, a Tamagotchi-like virtual pet to help you learn to properly perform TDD. Just like the 90's game, you must feed it and take care of it, but this time, with good TDD techniques.

Andrew McElroy has started a new fund raising campaign for TryRuby.org (originally developed by _why), to add a ton of new features, increase the platform support, and add new lessons to the application. If you have ever used TryRuby and what to make it better for someone else, consider making a donation today.

Just a quick note to mention that Hiroshi Nakamura has put together a super-useful Google Spreadsheet comparing the features of many popular HTTP libraries currently available in Ruby. Need to know which one throws exceptions vs uses error codes? How about which one is Ruby 1.9 compatible? Which can make parallel requests? Check it out.

Heroku offers background job workers on a similar monthly fee to their dynos. But, if you don't ALWAYS have jobs to do, then you may just be wasting your money on an idle worker. HireFire, by Michael van Rooijen uses the Heroku API to automatically grow and even shut down your background workers based on the number of outstanding jobs in your application.

Code School's Rails Best Practices course has recently added a new prize: a free Peepcode screencast of your choice when you complete the course. The prize is retroactive, so if you've already completed the course, then you should check your prizes and head on over to Peepcode.

Previous Episodes

More upgrades, a handful of cool projects like green-light, postfixer, roar, and sausage, and our usual rundown of top blog entries, this time about testing payment processing, designing restful search urls, and workflows for staging your designers files into git on this Sherpa-led edition of Ruby5.

MiniTest, Lunchy, Ruby Method Finder, and using Backup with Heroku's pgbackup, as well as HTML5 multi-file upload, Rack::PageSpeed, and a Rails Testing Workshop for charity are on this episode of Ruby5.